Courtesy of Hood Museum of Art

Label

Audio player

Audio by Hood Museum of Art

Francesco Trevisani’s Beheading of St. John the Baptist is typical of the small-scale paintings he produced for connoisseurs and collectors throughout his long and brilliant career in Rome. Its strong chiaroscuro and generally dark tone evoke the style of Antonio Zanchi (1631–1722), Trevisani’s first teacher in Venice, where the Istrian-born artist trained before moving to Rome about 1678.

Trevisani’s decision to set the scene at night may have been influenced by his desire to demonstrate his skills as a tenebrist. It allowed him to give Salome’s shimmering fabrics their maximum impact in the austere surroundings of the prison. He further emphasizes the gruesome atmosphere by the gallows-like apparatus acting as a repoussoir at the left. His only other known representation of the Baptist’s beheading — an event described in the Bible in Mark 6 — is an even smaller canvas at Bremen, where he shows the severed head being placed by the executioner onto the charger.

The height of the picture corresponds to three roman braccie. This was a standard size, and many paintings of this format are recorded in the paintings-cabinet of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni (1667–1740), the greatest patron of the time, in whose household Trevisani lived from 1698 to 1743, dispatching many works to patrons such as Louis XIV of France, Carlos III of Spain, and João V of Portugal.

Duncan Bull